The land appears normal, even healthy. Spring is pushing its first verdant shoots up through the fertile black soil. Birds crowd the forests of pine and birch that seem to stretch endlessly.
But this is a deception. The land is poisoned, and most of the people who once lived here have left.
The villages along the road to Narodichy stand empty and abandoned.
Narodichy, about 40 miles west of Chernobyl, lies in the heart of a 230,000-square-kilometer swath of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia that was laid to waste by the inadvertent nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl power station.
Ten years after the Chernobyl catastrophe, the most advanced scientific, technical and medical knowledge has little to offer the people of Narodichy. Experts who have spent a decade studying the problem still do not have a firm grip on the consequences of the disaster or what to do to mitigate the damage already done.
But a journey across this vast, ruined land helps lend dimension to the enormity of what went wrong at Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor unit during the early morning hours of April 26, 1986.
Two hundred families once lived in the brightly painted timber houses of Velyki Kleschi. Today the paint has faded, and only one old woman, Vera Avramchuk, stubbornly remains.
A triangular orange and yellow sign stands like a sentry at the road leading into Avramchuk’s padlocked village. “Human habitation and agricultural activity forbidden!” it commands.
All of the land within an 18-mile radius of Chernobyl is defined as an “exclusion zone” where no one is allowed to live, and no one enters without special permission.
It is an eerie landscape dotted with some 800 open pits–the graveyards of vehicles and other equipment contaminated during the struggle to bring Chernobyl’s nuclear fire under control. The 5,000 people who still work at the Chernobyl plant–the only human activity permitted–travel in and out of the zone on a special train.
The next region is the so-called “permanent control zone.”
Officially, this means that living in the area is discouraged and periodic health monitoring is mandatory for those who remain. In reality it means that it is unsafe to live there, but the impoverished governments of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus simply cannot afford to evacuate the 237,000 people who have stayed.
Radioactive fallout, however, does not settle in neat concentric circles. A map of the fallout pattern looks like a splotchy malignancy seeping north and west of Chernobyl. Belarus was the unluckiest–fully a quarter of its territory and a fifth of its population bore the brunt of the contamination.
The Narodichy district sits on the western edge of one of the most seriously contaminated zones.
“Our lives were chopped in half by Chernobyl. For us, there was our life before Chernobyl–normal and healthy–and our life after Chernobyl. The two halves cannot be made whole,” said Mikhail Sazonenko, 50, who teaches in a local school.
Before Chernobyl, the Narodichy district had 36,000 residents. Today the population is 17,000 and shrinking.
“The year before the accident, this district was second in the Soviet Union for production of potatoes, and we received a medal. Now we are not allowed to grow anything,” said Valery Trohimenko, 29, a local administrator.
“Every day, people are leaving. If we could rebuild the economy, maybe people would stay, but the government has no money to help us,” he said. “It seems there is nothing anyone can do for us.”
This Friday, to mark the 10th anniversary of history’s most terrifying technological accident, the residents of Narodichy will unveil a simple, black granite slab in the town’s main park.
“To the memory of the lands and villages of the Narodichy district killed by Chernobyl” the inscription reads.
The memorial is little compensation for the price borne by the residents. Even a series of high-level international conferences to mark the anniversary has served mainly to underscore the uncertainties that still surround the disaster.
The continuing debate over the death toll is a good example of the problem.
Most authorities agree that 31 people were killed as a direct result of the accident. These were firefighters and plant personnel who suffered acute radiation poisoning and died within days. Beyond that, figures vary wildly, often reflecting the source’s political agenda.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a watchdog group that promotes the safe use of nuclear energy, held a conference in Vienna last week at which Angela Merkel, the German environmental minister and conference president, spoke of “dozens of dead people.”
But the Ukrainian Health Ministry told the same conference that up to 125,000 of its citizens have died from diseases related to the accident. Extrapolating that figure to Russia and Belarus would put the death toll at close to 500,000.
The Ukrainian government, of course, has its eye on a $3.1 billion aid package the West has offered in exchange for shutting down Chernobyl’s two remaining reactors.
But the government’s high body count cannot be blamed solely on political expediency. Ukraine has experienced a startling increase in its mortality rate, as has almost every place in the former Soviet Union. How much of this excess mortality can be attributed to Chernobyl and how much should be attributed to the region’s collapsing health-care system and other causes is hard to pin down.
Not every illness suffered by a Ukrainian can be blamed on Chernobyl, but at the same time, medical experts are beginning to conclude that the anxiety and depression of those living in the contaminated zones may be as harmful as radiation.
Larisa Savluk, 24, moved back into the “permanent control zone” in 1990 when she married a man from the officially closed village of Loznitsa, a few miles south of Narodichy.
Even though it was summer, she had constant chills. The condition persists, and doctors are at a loss to explain it. They assured her it is not caused by radiation.
She has been told, however, that her two children, aged 2 and 3, have thyroid “problems.” A clear link between Chernobyl and thyroid cancer in children has been established, but the figures vary, with some authorities reporting 600 cases and others putting the figure at 1,000.
Either way, it is several hundred times the norm in the West.
“The hospital said that, so far, my kids are OK, only little problems,” explained Savluk with a despairing shrug. The hospital visit was more than a year ago.
The good news is that childhood thyroid cancer is usually treatable, and only a few children in the area have died. More problematic is the fact that many children in the contaminated areas do not have access to good health care.
Savluk, who is Loznitsa’s mail carrier, said 300 families once lived in the village, but only about 40 remain. The school is closed. So are all the shops. People live off food they grow in the poisoned soil.
The village’s only economic activity seems to be focused around Savluk, who is responsible for handing out the meager monthly subsidies the government provides for people living in the contaminated zone.
“We feel like prisoners,” Savluk said. “The authorities say it is bad to live here, but they say we should wait here until they build houses for us some place else.”
As she spoke, she carefully counted out 1.5 million in Ukrainian karbovanets — about $7 — and handed it to Nadia Torbenko, 67, who gave a broad, toothless smile.
“Coffin money,” the old woman cackled.
Unlike natural disasters–earthquakes, floods, hurricanes–which are one-time calamities, Chernobyl continues to poison its environment. The likelihood of a “second Chernobyl” at the reactors still operating at the plant is a real concern, but even on this issue, expert opinion is ambiguous.
The IAEA’s recent Vienna conference concluded that “the direct causes which finally provoked the accident in Chernobyl are known today and, as far as we know, have been eliminated.” Yet Hans Blix, the IAEA’s director general, wrote not long ago that “operating the RBMK reactors in the ex-Soviet Union is like driving a 1928 Ford–safe only with very special handling.”
Fifteen Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors are in use in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania.
French and German nuclear safety agencies agree that the most serious design deficiencies in the RBMK reactors have been corrected and that “a repetition of the explosion-like accident seems to be hardly possible today.”
But the same report goes on to say that “despite the significant safety improvements after the Chernobyl accident, there are still important safety deficiencies in RBMK plants,” including several “new problems” that have cropped up over the last few years.
One problem at the Chernobyl plant has been the steady departure of experienced reactor technicians who are opting out of the surreal wasteland of Chernobyl for better paying jobs at power plants in Russia.
Perhaps the bottom line is that the Group of 7 industrial nations are willing to pay Ukraine billions to shut down Chernobyl’s No. 1 and No. 3 reactor units (the No. 2 unit was shut down in 1991 after a fire in its turbine).
But nobody knows what to do about the destroyed No. 4 unit, which is entombed in a 10-story high slab of concrete and steel known as the “sarcophagus.”
Again, more conflicting data: Soviet authorities originally claimed they poured 300,000 to 410,000 cubic meters of concrete in building the sarcophagus, but Alexander Sich, an American nuclear engineer writing in the current issue of The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, said that structural drawings suggest that only about 161,000 cubic meters were poured.
Hastily erected over a six-month period–a heroic effort that exposed tens of thousands of workers to dangerous levels of radiation–the sarcophagus was intended to last 30 years. That estimate has since been revised to 15 years; ten of those years have elapsed.
The concrete casing has started to crack, allowing radioactive dust to leak. French and German engineers who recently examined the sarcophagus concluded that its structural integrity was “questionable” and that external loads, such as snow, could cause it to collapse.
The crumbling sarcophagus is an appallingly apt monument to the only deserving victim of Chernobyl: the Soviet system. There is little doubt that the explosion at Chernobyl hastened the demise of the USSR.
The Soviet government’s attempts to minimize the accident only served to intensify the ill-effects on its population. As the true dimensions of the calamity became obvious, Chernobyl became a metaphor for all that was wrong with the Soviet system.
“An abscess, long hidden within our society, had just burst: the abscess of complacency and self-flattery, of corruption and protectionism, of narrow mindedness and self-serving privilege,” wrote Gregori Medvedev, the Soviet physicist.
“Now, as it rotted, the corpse of a bygone era–the age of lies and spiritual decay–filled the air with the stench of radiation.”
For residents of Narodichy, “the stench of radiation” is more than literary metaphor. It is a paralyzing reality they must cope with every day.
Dr. Svyatoslav Kolomychuk is the director of the district’s only hospital. Over the past year he has seen 483 children with thyroid illnesses, 149 with respiratory problems and 127 with nervous disorders and scores of others with ailments ranging from anemia to depression.
His hospital has no hot water and suffers constant shortages of basic medicines. He is understaffed. “We don’t have enough children’s specialists. Specialists don’t want to come here,” he said.
Fatigue and frustration have taken their toll on Kolomychuk. His words come slowly, painfully.
“As a doctor, I wish that everyone could be evacuated from here,” he said. “No one should live here. But that’s just my dream. It couldn’t happen.”
